


50 sentences

by Dispatches (orphan_account)



Category: 24
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-11
Updated: 2010-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-09 10:06:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/86015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Dispatches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>50 1-sentence stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	50 sentences

**Author's Note:**

> An experimental work inspired by the [](http://community.livejournal.com/1sentence/profile)[**1sentence**](http://community.livejournal.com/1sentence/) concept, using one of their lists of keywords (set Alpha); I didn't actually submit this to the comm because I didn't want to stick to one pairing or character.
> 
> These sentences ramble all over the first six seasons and refer to a _lot_ of different characters; if no name is mentioned, you can assume I'm talking about Jack.

1\. Comfort

Even when he knows it's not really going to help, Jack likes to feel the weight of a gun pressing against some part of his body: hip, chest, ankle, it doesn't matter, as long as he knows it's there.

2\. Kiss

In Arab countries, men hold hands; Arab men even kiss each other on the lips, meaning nothing more by it than a token of respect, so when Hamri al-Assad kisses Jack briefly on the cheek, Jack knows it doesn't mean anything he should worry about, no matter how much of himself he sees reflected in Assad's eyes.

3\. Soft

The inside of the elbow, the crease of the thigh; Nina knows there are soft places on Jack's body, if you know where to look.

4\. Pain

Burke's only role at CTU is to inflict enough pain on interrogation subjects to encourage them to talk without leaving any physical trace, and he does this very well, though that's not the hard part: the hard part is not wiping their foreheads when they start to sweat.

5\. Potatoes

The potatoes are burnt, the beef is dry, the peas are a pile of green mush, and Tony hasn't eaten more than a mouthful of any of it, but it doesn't matter because Michelle's face is flushed pink from the stove and she has never looked more beautiful.

6\. Rain

It's raining on the day of her father's funeral, and Kim is glad, because she feels so blank and dead inside that she can't summon up any tears; she thinks the rain dripping down her face must make her seem less heartless.

7\. Chocolate

CTU agents keep long, difficult hours and they don't always get a chance to leave the building for meals; this explains why Chloe always keeps a bar of chocolate in the bottom drawer of her desk, though not why she has never told anyone about it.

8\. Happiness

The first time he slept with Audrey, Jack woke up with her head on his chest, feeling something whose unfamiliarity nagged at him like a loose tooth, and it wasn't until Audrey stirred and murmured "Morning, handsome" that he realised: _I know this, I remember this: I used to call it "happiness."_

9\. Telephone

"Turn it _off_," Morris says, and when Chloe ignores him, he grabs the phone from her hand and tosses it into the sea, silencing her protests with a kiss: "We're on _holiday_," he murmurs, and she bonks his forehead with her own and smiles.

10\. Ears

One time Ramon Salazar told Jack to cut off the ears of a _campesino_ who had been caught trespassing on his property (_use a blunt knife -- I don't want it to be over too quick_), and for a dizzy, terrifying moment Jack thought Ramon would want to watch -- but no; such matters of petty discipline were too minor for Ramon, and Jack was able to bribe the terrified man to scream loudly and then to run away and never come back.

11\. Name

There are some days when Jack has to say his own name so many times that it begins to sound like gibberish, or like the words of a spell: meaningless in themselves, but deadly in their

effect.

12\. Sensual

Jack isn't bothered by Ramon Salazar's cruelty, or his ruthlessness, or his utter lack of regard for anyone but himself -- no, what bothers him about Ramon Salazar is his capacity for taking pleasure in food and drink and sex, for it makes Jack's skin crawl to think that a degenerate like Ramon can get any kind of joy out of life without having to pay a steep and terrible price for it.

13\. Death

Ryan's shaking all over and his palms are sweaty and everything he's ever done seems like a waste of time now because Saunders is still on the loose and all he can hear is Jack's voice saying "God forgive me" and he is alone, alone, alone.

14\. Sex

Richard Heller doesn't usually pick up strangers in bars, but he hasn't gotten laid since his father became Secretary of Defense and all his liberal friends (and that's _all_ his friends) started tiptoeing around him -- and _this_ guy doesn't seem to know or care whose son he is, only that he's available, and happy to let his girlfriend come too, as long as she doesn't expect Richard to touch her.

15\. Touch

His fingers brush Audrey's as he passes the knife to her between the bars of the vent, a brief touch, businesslike, but still reassuring to both of them.

16\. Weakness

There's a syringe and a needle and a tourniquet and an ampoule of pure lab-grade heroin in the cabinet in the corner, and Jack knows this, and yet he shakes, sweats, shivers, aches, every cell of his body wanting a fix, not one atom of him willing to give in.

17\. Tears

Jack can't believe how bad he feels, because innocent or not, Ryan Chappelle is a pain in the ass -- no, _was_ a pain in the ass, past tense, and that's the point, now he thinks of it, the reason why he can't stop himself from crying.

18\. Speed

He has seconds to defuse the bomb, seconds before it blows up a chunk of Los Angeles and him with it, and he can't make his hands move any faster no matter how hard he tries.

19\. Wind

Jack can still taste the vomit in his mouth when the flash comes, and the wind that was cooling his sweaty forehead is suddenly sinister, a bringer of poison, a spreader of misery.

20\. Freedom

Michelle picked Tony up from the prison, and the hope and uncertainty in her eyes as she talked about him finding another job made him wish -- just for a moment -- that he hadn't been pardoned, that he still had no choice about what to do with his life.

21\. Life

Teri knows it's too soon for the baby to be kicking, so it must be some part of her that's jumping inside, now that she knows she's going to have another child: another reason to cling to life, as if she needed one.

22\. Jealousy

Jack's palms twitch when he sees Kim with Barry, and it doesn't matter that she's a grown woman who can make her own decisions: the man's old enough to be her father, sure enough in her affections to be the one who reassures and protects her and keeps her safe from harm, and, goddamn it, that's _his_ job.

23\. Hands

Chase's hand is clumsy now, and he always has to wear a watch with a wide wristband so that nobody thinks he's a cutter or a suicide, but what eats at him the most is that he can't fire a gun two-handed any more, even if he wanted to.

24\. Taste

They say their goodbyes, and Walt kisses her, and Audrey wants to weep because she still remembers what Jack's skin tasted like, and she's never going to taste it again.

25\. Devotion

Michelle worries sometimes about whether she loves Tony enough, because she knows that given the same choice between love and duty, she chose duty, and he chose love; but Tony loves her enough not to care that she loves duty more than him.

26\. Forever

When Jack's feeling optimistic, he likes to imagine that there's no life after death, that when the bullets and the bombs finally catch up on him there'll be no punishment and no reward: just forgetfulness for all eternity.

27\. Blood

The strongest muscle in the human body is the jaw, which many highly-trained and experienced operatives overlook -- when your hands are bound and a lone hostile presents his jugular vein, you must take the option to bite, no matter how distasteful you find it, no matter how long afterwards you find yourself spitting out the taste of blood.

28\. Sickness

Michelle felt time slow to a crawl as she waited for her test results, surrounded by the dead and the dying, sure that any minute now -- any minute -- her nose would start to bleed.

29\. Melody

As the jailer flays his back, Jack closes his eyes and plays a song in his head, a simple tune he learned as a child; he never figured out the real words, not that it matters now.

30\. Star

When he killed the Drazens, CTU wanted him to step into the limelight, raise the profile of the agency and make people understand the role it had played, but he was having none of it, wouldn't let them make a star of him for doing the only thing he could have done.

31\. Home

Martha had spent time in the White House before, of course, but it wasn't until Air Force One was shot down that she was forced to start thinking of it as home -- and that was also when she started needing stronger drugs, and she doesn't think that's a coincidence.

32\. Confusion

The worst part of being stuck in China isn't the torture, because he's always been good at handling pain; no, it's the fact that he doesn't speak the language, doesn't know the culture, can't read people's expressions or the way their bodies move; it's being lost, and never getting a chance to find his way.

33\. Fear

Jack growls to Derek that the only reason Derek's _conscious_ is because Jack doesn't feel like _carrying_ him, and it's just a bit of fake bravado to get the kid to shut up, but there's real fear in Derek's eyes, and it stabs at Jack briefly: one more thing to regret.

34\. Lightning/Thunder

The first time Chase sees that Kim's afraid of lightning, he laughs, though not unkindly; it's not until she tells him about the night she saw the bomb flash from a distance that his face turns grave and he puts his arms around her.

35\. Bonds

Handcuffs, shackles, plastic restraints, ropes wound round his wrists or his ankles, dirty little rags shoved into his mouth; the bastards've tried them all, and none of them work, because the only thing that has ever bound him is his own belief in what he needs to do.

36\. Market

Walt Cummings never understood what power meant in the modern age until he noticed what happened to oil prices after Saddam invaded Kuwait -- from then on he _knew_, as sure as he had two hands, that it was the markets that made the world dance.

37\. Technology

"Yeah, I guess I _do_ like machines better than people!" says Chloe to Morris, not getting what question he's really asking, not getting another chance to answer it.

38\. Gift

"How do you _do_ that?" says Chase the first time he sees Jack bounce back from a beating that should have floored a man twice his size, and Jack just smirks grimly and says "It's a gift."

39\. Smile

When they first meet, Audrey notices that Jack's smile is purely social, forced and unconvincing, and in the back of her mind she resolves that one day she'll make him smile for real.

40\. Innocence

"I was sixteen when I first killed a man," Kim says to her therapist, the story so old and stale to her that she's forgotten how to feel the shock she felt that morning when she pulled the trigger.

41\. Completion

_I've got to get out of the habit of saying "when this is all over",_ Jack thinks to himself as his phone rings for the fifth time in an hour, _because it's never over._

42\. Clouds

Kim jumps out of the car, her heart torn between anger and guilt, but it's not until she sees the mushroom cloud that she feels the grief -- _my father is dead_, she thinks, _oh God oh Jesus my father is dead..._

43\. Sky

When Kim was a child, she used to love staring up at the sky, before she knew there were enemy planes and bombs and satellites up there.

44\. Heaven

Gael lets the gun sit there before him and does not pick it up, even though he is in agony and it's only going to get worse, because he was always taught that suicides don't go to Heaven -- and sure, maybe that's bullshit, but when your life is over anyway, why take that kind of risk?

45\. Hell

Jack tells Audrey that being a field agent has been a kind of hell for him, since Teri died, and that's true; and he tells her he doesn't miss it, and that's a lie.

46\. Sun

There was a time when they left Jack in a cell alone for a period he marked out in scratched-in lines on the wall: when the sun passed the one small window and shone directly on his face, he would leave a mark to add to all the others, fifty-six in all.

47\. Moon

Audrey didn't ask about the scars on Jack's skin, figuring that he'd tell her if he felt the need; instead, she gave him eight new ones, crescent-shaped, on his back, like little moons.

48\. Waves

Three weeks after Teri died, Jack drove to the beach around midnight and walked into the sea with his shoes and all his clothes on, all the way out until the waves covered his head; he's never figured out why he turned around and walked back, and sometimes he thinks it was the wrong choice.

49\. Hair

After they turn off the IV, they give Audrey a chance to wash up, and although the smell of the sweat in her hair makes her want to vomit, she doesn't have time to shower properly; so she splashes her head with cold water and tells herself they couldn't have known she was innocent.

50\. Supernova

He's said goodbye to his son and he's saved Jack's life; now, as the bomb explodes around him in a blinding supernova, George Mason feels happy for the first time in years.


End file.
